Jokes You Can Use:

What’s the difference between Roast Beef and Pea Soup?

If fortune tellers know the future, how come it’s so difficult to find a happy medium?

The manager of a large city zoo was drafting a letter to order a pair of animals. He sat at his computer and typed the following sentence: “I would like to place an order for two mongooses, to be delivered at your earliest convenience.”

He stared at the screen, focusing on that odd word “mongooses.” Then he deleted the word and added another, so that the sentence now read: “I would like to place an order for two mongeese, to be delivered at your earliest convenience.”

Again he stared at the screen, this time focusing on the new word, which seemed just as odd as the original one. Finally, he deleted the whole sentence and started all over. “Everyone knows no fully stocked zoo should be without a mongoose,” he typed. “Please send us two of them.”

Middle School Science Minute

Citizen Science — Nova’s Energy Labs

I was recently reading the December 2016 issue of “Science Scope,” a magazine written for middle school science teachers, published by the National Science Teachers Association.

In this issue, I read the the Citizen Science article, “Power Up Science Learning with NOVA’s Energy Lab.” It was written by Jill Nugent. The article describes the process by which students and teachers can get involved in a citizen science project — NOVA’s Energy Lab.. For more information, please visit:

Myth #2: Each reader has a discrete, accurately measurable level of reading skill.

Myth #3: Readers should (almost always) read texts very near their reading level.

Reading research has repeatedly demonstrated the effects of prior knowledge on reading comprehension; simply put, it is easier to read and understand texts that talk about things you already know a lot about.